Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307472120
ISBN: 0307472124
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: 2008-11-18
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2008-11-18
Studio: Vintage

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER
National Book Critic's Circle Award Finalist

A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year
The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington Post

The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.


From the Trade Paperback edition.
Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham

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Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play).

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Morbid and depressing
Comment: Endearing? Hopeful? This is what people got out of the book? Wow, it sucked the life out of me and just about ruined my day. It's written well and flows smooth and fast. But, it's about the most heartbreaking book I've ever read. Reminds me of Schindlers list w/o the humanity. If you feel like you're just too happy, then read this, it will surely take all the joy away.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A rare prosaic masterpiece, couldn't put it down
Comment: Not since reading J.M. Coatzee's Disgrace have I found a writer's prose to be painfully good. Cormac Mcarthy's The Road is such a book. Sentences as stark, poignant and emotionally raw as the bleak and barren world they describe. The book is essentially a long poem, which, dark as the tale may be, at times reads as more of an ode to some humans' ability to find beauty and goodness in the darkest of times. An odyssey of a father and son caught in a near-post human world, there is scarcely a joyful moment in the entire book. And yet there is a truthful kind of hope in the familial bond and in the struggle for goodness, whether that goodness is a cultural construct or something greater (Mcarthy leaves it ambiguous).

For me, the book was a potent wake up call, the sort that we need everyday in an era of nuclear weapons, global warming, resource scarcity. It's unclear how the world came to be the way it is in "The Road" - a landscape full of ash and nearly completely dead - and the sad truth is that the reader can find any number of probable scenarios that could have made it that way, scenarios that don't seem so far-fetched.

I could write much more about The Road: its meditations on death, on nihilism, on memory and love, but like most great literature, dissecting it would cheapen it. I think it is an essential story for our times. I look forward to the film.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Literary Affectation or Simple Laziness?
Comment: Not using quotation marks to denote dialog is either a literary affectation or simple laziness.

Mr. Mac should grow up and write like an adult already.

:/

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Master of deception
Comment: All along the book, you're waiting for something to happen. Suspens is at its climax all the time but in the end...well nothing. This couple just go from luck to luck, they should probably have played loto.
All right, the bonds between a father and his child are very well described but apart from that, I found the book pretty empty. The reflexion the father has on his life, on what happens is not even that deep after all and they just are lucky on their trip, finding food just when they needed it the most. ô fortunate!
Well in a word, the book could have been great and has some sparks of greatness but it is definitely missing a little something.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Sigh...this is a special novel.
Comment: A novel of loving and horrible content...just read it. I think the only other experience of similar feelings was while at Dachau. You will be bound to appreciate your children and life so much more....

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